Posted on 06/26/2012 12:03:59 PM PDT by Mount Athos
The Archbishop of Canterbury is writing a book in which he lambasts the government for shrinking the State. In its current ‘shrunken’ form, the state accounts for around half of the UK economy. This is evidently sinful. It should be bigger, presumably like the economies of the former communist countries of Eastern Europe. Anglicanism has become extremely political. The Archbishop's Council has just reprimanded the government for vetoing changes to the EU treaty last December and warned them not to think of leaving the EU. In his speech at the St. Paul’s service to mark the Queen’s diamond jubilee, the Archbishop cursed bankers and said we ought to look after the environment and be less greedy. A short while ago the churchmen were expressing support for the posh anti-capitalist demonstrators outside St. Paul’s.
It is not just any old politics the church embraces. It is the big State, high tax, green, protectionist, Keynesian politics of the left and fascist right. But as many people have pointed out, once the sanctimonious veneer is stripped away, these polices have been shown not to be in the interests of ordinary people. Socialism promised to liberate and enrich the masses, but it was discovered long ago that it did the exact opposite. Indeed so many of the bishops’ rants seem to be directed against the interests of the world’s poorest. The E.U. (so beloved of the bishops) is a protectionist club which, it is well known, has caused untold misery to African and Asian farmers, and has also raised the cost of food enormously for everyone in Europe (needless to say, the poorest are hardest hit). The green bandwagon, onto which the bishops have jumped with such fervour, is clearly directed against the world’s poorest people on so many fronts – preventing them from using DDT to keep malaria at bay, preventing them from using inorganic fertilizers and pesticides and herbicides and GM crops in order to grow more food, preventing them from using the cheapest forms of electrical generation in order to join the modern world, and so on.
The policies of these churchmen are clearly not designed to help the poor. They reflect the views and are designed to please the Statist-middle class intelligentsia to which Williams & Co belong. Archbishop Williams stood up there in the pulpit, slapping the Queen on the back for doing such a great job and sucking up to the royal family, while telling the rest of us off, the wickedly "aspirational" hoi polloi, for being so materialistic …. all those greedy people looking for a nice house (or even just a house) …. all those greedy people wondering if their plundered pensions would be enough to support them … all those greedy farmers in Africa wanting to sell their food to Europeans … all those greedy Third Worlders wanting to build cheap coal-power plants so that they can have electricity.
As a Christian, I must sit in church listening to these oafs preach to me about global warming and the terrible materialism of modern society. I am a sinner, they tell me, because I am not green. I am sinner because I believe ordinary people are quite right to want more for themselves and their families. Christ, I think, was infinitely wiser than the arrogant Archbishop. Unlike the bishop, He resisted attempts to politicise his message (Give unto Caesar).
The Archbishop plays the part well. He has adopted all the trade-mark slow, aloof mannerisms and body language of an earthly saint. Those absurd bushy eyebrows are there to tell us ‘I am thinking thoughts too lofty to notice stuff like facial hair’. He is so wise. So good.
But don’t be fooled. He is neither. He is another in a line of hard-boiled anti-capitalist churchmen. Remember those old reactionaries Thomas More and Thomas Malthus who both loathed trade and free markets. They said, like the greens do today, that such things were causing the lower orders to be paid too much (making them materialistic).
Under the influence of worldly men like Rowan Williams, the Church of England has got itself into a terrible mess. Thank God he's going.
No, you are a sinner because you willingly remain in this heretical sham of a "church." Get out. The exit of Rowan Williams won't help it.
This idiot is New Ageism run amok. No need to believe in the Virgin Birth, many paths to salvation, all religions have the same god, right.
You will like this!
Why MUST you sit there----are you handcuffed to the pew? Such nonsense. If you hear something in church that you isn't right, get up, leave, and don't look back.
that you *know* isn’t right
I think what Durkin is saying, is that the Anglican church seems to be expecting him as a Christian to sit there listening to these oafs, etc. because it endorsed said oafs.
If he wants to stay in that communion he might or might not have a whole lot of choice of congregations. But sometimes a communion goes so sour that it makes sense to knock on other communions’ doors.
I find it odd that this article is attacking Rowan and comparing him unfavorably with the likes of Thomas More.
More at least stood up to the creeping influence of politics in the church and focused on the principles of that faith. Williams is doing the opposite.
You could be right. I agree.
I don't see why he needs to misrepresent and insult More to make his point.
More's thought experiment Utopia is just that. In real life, More was a statesman who encouraged the rapid growth of free enterprise in Britain.
Well, I guess they have to talk about the 'social' sins, because they sure don't want to talk about the sexual sins, even though it is those that are causing most of the misery in today's world.
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